The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
MAHATMA Gandhi was environment-friendly in an age when the world was gearing up for the most intense exploitation of resources known to history. Underlying Gandhi's humanism was the idea that man's nature and his relation with the external environment represents an organic whole and cannot be compartmentalised. Gandhi advocated a …
FOR THOSE who would have us believe the environment movement is the product of the twentieth century Western mind, Banwari's book provides a fitting rebuff. Almost admirable in scope, it introduces the environmental dimensions of Indian tradition in a manner that is absorbing, to say the least. What is even …
CONFRONTED with the prohibitive cost of linking remote hill villages to state power grids, the government is pushing small hydro electric schemes as an alternative solution to meet their power needs. So convinced are government experts of the usefulness of these schemes, they have included a total investment of more …
THE POTENTIAL of small hydro power in the country has been estimated at nearly 5,000 mw, but only about 86 mw have been realised. Of this, about 25 mw is from micro hydel schemes. In the Eighth Plan, a capacity of 256 mw is expected to be added, of which …
Coal, oil and large hydel plants have always been associated with power generation, while small hydro systems have been shunned because of a belief that the "smaller the size, the higher the cost". On the face of it, this is true: In some small hydro schemes in the Uttar Pradesh …
A BIBLIOGRAPHY is useful not only as a guide to further study and research, but also because it gauges the current attitudes and obsessions prevalent in academia. Researchers in the North are slowly waking up to a fact long recognised by activists and writers in the South: that environmental issues …
THE NAIROBI-based United Nations Environment Programme has been asked by its governing council to focus less on monitoring the global environment and more on advising and helping developing countries. This new responsibility, termed capacity building in UN parlance, means UNEP will promote environmentally benign technology and "skills" to developing countries …
THE BOOK focuses on a new environmental agenda for cities, followed by details on environmental problems in the home, workplace and neighbourhood. The treatment of the subject makes interesting reading of a much debated topic. For a change, concrete suggestions emerge for tackling environmental problems, especially health problems. Despite the …
ALTHOUGH the tulip originated in southeast Asia, the tiny European nation of Holland has transformed the flower into both a national symbol and a major foreign exchange-earner. Between March and May every year, when the tulips bloom, thousands of tourists rush to take in the sight of the rainbow colours …
When the axis of the monsoon trough falls between Jodhpur and Kharagpur, well-distributed rain falls over central India and the Indo-Gangetic plain. Sometimes, the trough shifts north, towards the Himalaya. In this situation, known as the break monsoonk, rain fall in the Himalaya foothills, and drought conditions prevail in the …
WESTERN nations are worried about increasing international migration. Says a 1992 document of Western nations, "Migration is now seen as a priority issue equal in political weight to other major global challenges such as the environment, population growth and economic imbalances between regions." The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in …
SCIENTISTS have confirmed environmentalists' fears about the depletion of the ozone layer, by measuring a 50 per cent increase in the ultraviolet radiation striking Ushuaia in south Argentina. According to a report recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the increase occurred in December 1990 when a piece of …
THE LAUNCH of the Global Anti-Golf Movement was announced by representatives of anti-golf environmental movements from various Asian countries, who met in Penang in Malaysia, soon after the three-day Golf Course and Resort Development Conference in April. The meet was sponsored by the Japan-based Global Network for Anti-Golf Course Action, …
What is good for the environment in Himachal Pradesh seems to depend entirely on political ambitions in the state. HP governor Gulsher Ahmed's decision to revive proposals for huge cement plants in Chamba and Mandi districts has triggered yet another round of political controversy. Ahmed's decision reverses the cancellation by …
LED BY giants Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, the US tobacco industry has sued the environmental protection agency (EPA), claiming its report on passive smoking -- the inhalation of exhaled cigarette smoke -- was unscientific and arbitrary. The EPA report, published in January, classified exhaled tobacco smoke in the most-serious …
The recent discovery of pieces of the world's oldest ocean-going ships off Ras Al Junaya on the coast of Oman by a team of Franco-Italian archaeologists, provides more proof of the glory of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished in Pakistan and northwestern India from 2500 BC to 1700 BC. …
THERE is more to health policy than just policy for the health sector. But the World Development Report 1993 clearly shows the mandarins -- read health experts -- of the World Bank have trivialised the issue because holism is a philosophy they still have to learn. Surely, for a hungry …
THERE'S a maxim in Sanskrit that states peacocks in the forest are happy to see clouds in the sky. It's a pointer to the irrefutable fact of life that one cannot keep away from what is dear to one. Something similar happened to Madeleine Slade, popularly known as Mira Behn, …
